death of Prince Philip...
By his own admission, Charles Dance has always been a private man. He doesn’t court publicity – “I don’t have a press agent,” he says, “I’ve never understood why people do” – and certainly doesn’t court the paparazzi. But last September he dropped the ball, and boy, did he pay for it. Dance was in Venice with his girlfriend, Italian film producer Alessandra Masi, when he thought he’d found a quiet portion of beach, away from prying eyes and snapping lenses, to enjoy a splash. As it happened, he hadn’t gone far enough. The next day, the tabloids were ablaze. Photographs, lots of photographs, showed Dance and Masi, 53, canoodling in the surf, but the headlines all picked up the same theme. “Charles Dance shows off his impressive beach body at 73,” panted one. “Game of Thrones star Charles Dance shows off his buff physique,” heaved another.
Some three decades after he turned down an audition to be James Bond on account of believing he was “too ginger”, here was Dance’s 007 moment at last. So, did he see the coverage? He emits a rasping, baritone laugh and squirms slightly. “Yes, let my guard drop a bit there... I shouldn’t have, the number of years I’ve been doing this job... but, you know, that terrible old cliché – it’s better to be looked over than overlooked in our business.”
In his study at home in north London, Dance, now 74, is full of mirth, anecdote and wisdom. As early spring sunshine pours through the gaps in a blackout blind, he rocks on a desk chair in front of a stack of old CDs, the light catching on his silvering locks. “I mustn’t grumble. The sun is shining, spring looks as if it’s finally here...” He’s just been to the garden centre. “What I plan to do is start a better vegetable garden than last year. I grew a few potatoes, some carrots... the cabbages didn’t turn out too well. Boring broccoli. I’m going to do that a bit more efficiently.”
Dance and Masi, who moved in last year, have spent lockdown together. She may be one reason for his contentment, but another might be the late-career flourish he is enjoying. From Game of Thrones, in which he was the scheming Lord Tywin Lannister, to The Crown, in which he was the scheming Earl Mountbatten, he’s never been more profligate in stealing scenes, and never more in-demand. As one US publication put it recently, “Instead of, ‘Hey, it’s that guy,’ it’s [now], ‘Hey, it’s Charles f..king Dance’.”
His last memorable turn was as newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in Mank, David Fincher’s film about the making of Citizen Kane. Set in 1940 and shot like an old Hollywood noir, it has Gary Oldman playing the titular Herman Mankiewicz, a volatile screenwriter trying to pen his big picture debut. Dance enters the fray at key moments as Hearst, whose life as a tyrannical press baron famously inspired the character of Kane. And, yes, he pinches most of his scenes.
Dance appeared in Fincher’s first film, Alien 3, some three decades ago, and they’ve kept in touch over the years. “Out of the blue, I got this email saying he’s making a film around the making of Citizen Kane, and how would I like to play Hearst? He said, ‘It’s a glorified extra, but I’d love you to do it’,” Dance recalls. “I read the script and thought it was a bit more than a glorified extra, more of a telling cameo, but I said, ‘David, I would come and change light bulbs for you’.”
Decades of playing villains – from For Your Eyes Only to Last Action Hero, right up to Game of Thrones – has given his hooded eyes and hooked features a gently menacing air. Add to that age and fine ’40s tailoring, and he’s perfectly ominous. I tell Dance I am curious about the source of his energy, specifically how he can still command lustful tabloid spreads dedicated to his strapping torso. Apparently it’s all down to his fitness routine. “It hasn’t been much very lately, other than a 6km walk on Hampstead Heath each morning. My obsession is swimming. For the last five or six years I’ve tried to swim [in the Lido, a public pool on the Heath] every morning. One year I did mid-March to November – that was my limit, then it becomes more medicinal than pleasurable.” The Lido, he says, “is a great place to think, once your body is used to the cold. Then you get up, have a full cardiac-arrest breakfast, and you’re fit for the day. I can recommend it.”
He used to run, but the knees are shot, and he likes to cycle, but a stiff neck makes that dicey, so it’s “swimming, vigorous walking, and chucking a few weights around”. “I’m lucky to have a fast metabolism... but I actually find it terribly boring, the whole business. I don’t go to a gym – you get all that gym talk, surrounded by people in Lycra and with buff gym bodies. I am just in reasonably good shape for a man of my age.” Still, he feels he has a couple of kilos to shed. “It’s going in all the wrong places,” he says, prodding at the sides of his plaid shirt. “You get something called ‘love handles’, which are not nice. Either I go on a very strict diet, or I have to change my swimming apparel.”
This is not the first time Dance’s looks have been scrutinised so closely. In the late 1980s, flush from a string of romantic roles, including as Guy Perron in British Raj series The Jewel in the Crown, he was repeatedly compared to Robert Redford (“Not very fair to Robert Redford”) and branded “the thinking woman’s crumpet” by journalists. “I can remember the first time somebody called me that,” he says. “Shortly afterwards, I was in Cannes, walking along the Croisette, and coming towards me was [broadcaster] Joan Bakewell, who was known as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’. As we met, we both said, ‘Hello, crumpet…’” A rasp. “Thankfully that’s passed. Clever journalists would come up with something else.”
Dance’s mother, Nell, was a cook who worked all her life; his father, Walter, was an electrical engineer who’d fought in the Second Boer War. Dance grew up in Plymouth with a brother 10 years his senior, Michael. Walter died when Dance was four, after which Nell remarried, to Edward, a civil servant. For most of his life, Dance had been under the impression that his father was in his 50s when he died. It wasn’t until he appeared on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? in 2017 that he learned Walter was in fact in his mid-70s when he died, and had previously had another family whose descendants now live in South Africa.
Dance worked as a labourer and plumber’s mate after studying at art school, where he’d fostered an interest in acting. He then met two retired thespians, Leonard and Martin, who coached him in the classics, bullied an RP (Received Pronunciation) accent into him, and taught him all they knew in exchange for a couple of pints in the local. Praise was hard to come by. “I can remember driving Leonard back from the pub, I thought I’d been pretty shit-hot working through Julius Caesar, and he got out of the car and said, ‘You don’t realise how bad you are, do you boy? See you next week!’” Dance smiles at the memory. “It’s very important to know when you’re not being good.” But he was good – good enough to soon join the Royal Shakespeare Company without having been to drama school. Not that it impressed his mother much; she was nonplussed by news of her son’s glamorous career.
Dance married sculptor Joanna Haythorn in 1970, and had two children, Oliver, now 46, and Rebecca, 40, before they divorced in 2004. He had another daughter, Rose, in 2012 with his then-fiancée Eleanor Boorman, a former model 26 years his junior. “I think every child tries to do better than their parents did. My mother did teach me to be independent – how to look after yourself, basically,” Dance says. “One thing she used to say, which I realise no parent ever should, is ‘Stop showing off.’ You should never stop a child showing off. Show off more!” So that’s how he has tried to be with his own children.
Is it different, parenting again in a younger generation? “Different in as much as we live in a different place,” he says. “My contribution is co-parenting, because we’re not together, and so it’s different in that respect. But [Rose] is a fantastic little girl. I do like children, I think they’re very special.” Boorman and Rose live “200 miles away”, so the homeschooling responsibility “has been down to her mother. But we FaceTime on a pretty regular basis”. And he has a granddaughter, too? “I do indeed. She’s about six months younger than my daughter. I think they think they’re like cousins.” He throws his hands up and flaps them away. “It’s all rather complicated but it doesn’t really matter at all, whatever their ‘titles’ are.” Would he consider marrying again? “N-no,” he says, after a split-second’s thought.
Curiously, much of Dance’s success has come in the past two decades. He trained at the RSC during the ’70s before moving into television and film, finding acclaim in both, not least in the ’80s, when the success of For Your Eyes Only and The Jewel in the Crown led to starring opposite Meryl Streep in Plenty and Greta Scacchi in White Mischief. But his is a career that has strengthened as it has matured. The noughties brought Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park and the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, while the past decade has seen him gain a small-screen Midas touch, instantly enhancing the class and quality of anything he appears in, to the extent that his name now looks unfinished without a “Sir” before it. “It’s swings and roundabouts in this business; I’m sure that Game of Thrones had something to do with it. To get offered a plum part in the most successful television series to date...”
That show has made him instantly recognisable to an entirely new generation. “I’m amazed. I can be sitting in a car, at night, in the rain, at traffic lights, and somebody on the other side of the road points and says, ‘Hello Charlie, you all right?’” A word of warning, mind: don’t approach him for a selfie. “No, hate it. I try to decline as graciously as I can, but I’d rather not. Most people accept it, but some say, ‘Oh, really?’ As if it’s obligatory! Which it’s not.”
Theatre seems to be one place we won’t see him. I mention that Sir Ian McKellen, his old RSC mucker, is to play Hamlet at the age of at least 81, in an age-blind show. “Is he really?” Dance says, with what may or may not be a roll of the eyes. “I wonder who’s playing his mother...” Not for you, then? “Not the parts that are traditionally for younger people. Other than for an intellectual exercise, I don’t really see the point of that,” he says. “I have this odd feeling about theatre. There are nights when I pray there’s going to be a bomb scare, an announcement – ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you must leave the theatre!’ – and the show is cancelled. And then there are nights that are fantastic and it goes well and that’s great, you get this applause and your ego has been boosted. But if I’m honest I prefer to be on a film set.”
So that’s where he’ll be, especially once the pandemic is over. I assume he’s vaccinated? “No,” Dance says, insouciantly, “I’ve had my invitation [to get the jab], but I went to Iceland to film in January, got tested every day, came back, went to the shops, woke up the next morning feeling shit, so did Alessandra, then we were positive. So we isolated for a couple of weeks, and now I think I’ll go and get jabbed.” Never has a man sounded so casual about catching a deadly disease at 74.
Post-lockdown, he’s looking forward to catchups with old friends, and being on set. He holds Sir John Gielgud, with whom he used to share an agent, as a role model. “He used to ring up and say, ‘Hello, Johnny Gielgud here, got any work?’ In his nineties! That’s what I’d like to do.” You can bet he will, too. That gives Dance another 20 years, at least. There must be some ambitions left? “Just keep working,” he replies modestly. Then he leans forward, narrows his eyes and steeples his fingers. “I would like to front more stuff,” he decides, finally. “I’m forever being asked to come in and play telling cameos...” And why not? He’s only just become Charles f..king Dance.
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